Latest Vinyl

Three gentle guitar improvisations… meditations, enriched with Ambient loopsets and delicate sound layers from tape. Takahiro Yorifuji sets up the right mood to calm down. It’s all that easy, the main thing is, the casette player’s working fine, the fingers will find the right notes all by themselves. Enjoy laid back listening. Comes with the 12″ EP, a gatefold cover print, a button and sticker with Hakobune logo – the CD is included as well. All packed in a nice and useful tote bag. Limited edition of 100 Vitex Negundo by hakobune

Anthems for Catharsis marks the follow up to thisquietarmy’s last full length studio works “Rebirths”, a representative collection of reworked tracks that have defined his purgative live performances. Between back-to-back tours in Europe & Asia and the release of live drone documents as well as collaborative works with Noveller, Aidan Baker/Hypnodrone Ensemble, André Foisy/Locrian, Syndrome/Amenra, thisquietarmy’s Eric Quach went back to the drawing board in his Montreal studio, at the end of 2014. Within the repetitive genre of ambient and drone, thisquietarmy constantly evolves and tries to incorporate new additional textures and structures into the music – for instance, think …

Launched in 2005, Celer is the work of Will Long, an American musician, educator, writer and photographer living in Japan, who also curates the Two Acorns label. Initially a duo based in California with Danielle Baquet, Celer has continued as a solo project since 2009, releasing music on numerous esteemed labels, such as Home Normal, Infraction, Spekk, and/OAR and many more. In addition, Will has collaborated on projects with notable artists such as Machinefabriek and Hakobune. A decade into his recording career, Celer arrives at the shores of the Los Angeles based label I, Absentee for the remarkable new full-length, …

“The album was composed, arranged, produced, recorded and mixed at GT Headquarters in Mexico City. Most of the compositions and arrangements were made at midnight because I find quite interesting and seductive the silence that prevails during of this time of a day. When I was composing-arrang- ing-producing this album my main goal was to achieve musically a sound narrative that could at some point explain an idea without using words or convey a sense of human cloning and its consequences; yet the real difficulty laid in creating the whole album from musical fragments and samples.” Burstbot is a project …

::vtol:: is the project of Dmitry Morozov, Moscow media artist, musician and engineer of strange sounding mechanisms. In the mid 00s Dmitry started to use actively his DIY and Circuit Bent instruments for his own music projects, as well as making instruments for other musicians and media artists. He is the first batch producer of music and video synthesizers at the post-Soviet area. Besides making music and instruments, Dmitry creates audiovisual art installations and promotes Circuit Bending and DIY Electronics in Russia by means of lectures and workshops. Papa Srapa is a contemporary visionary, analog synths shaman and sound artist. …

Testarossa is third studio album by Brinstaar. He says that this album is dedicated to redheaded blue-skinned Goddess. This work is reflecting Brinstaar’s deep and emotional chase for the elusive moment of infinite bliss that keeps him alive and conscious. While using mainly processed guitars for Infotswetock and synths for Mielisss, Brinstaar uses a lot of acoustic instruments and field recorded sounds in Testarossa now, thus creates much more intimate compositions. Of course, his specialty mesmerizing synth parts and precisely constructed guitar timbres are still here too. 320 numbered copies on black 12′ vinyl packed into gorgeous holographic jacket.

Latest CDs

Memory is that most elusive thing, so certain at a distance, but once examined up close full of holes and doubt. Memories fade, change, are re-written, morph and elide. At once ungraspable, unknowable and always out of reach they are also an essential part of each of us, and the basis of life as we know it. In Musicophilia: Tales of music and the brain, neurologist and author Oliver Sacks writes: “Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.” This album with its …

Amfibion takes the listener into a rich, bizarre and disorienting world, a biological melting pot of the uncanny, the bewildering and the awe inspiring. Comprised of treated field recordings of frogs taken during excursions in the Brazilian Amazon from 2007 to 2011, Amfibion is largely based on mating songs, and Artificial Memory Trace treats them in a manner which underlines the humid fecundity of this ecological wonderland. These pieces froth and foam, drip and slide from crashing crescendo to an eerie throb in the blink of an eye. There are croaks, shimmers, pulses and drones, sounds come together suddenly, and …

Iran’s Arash Akbari’s Vanishing Point nestles into inbetween places, revelling in the indistinct, the delicate and the mysterious. Bringing together field recordings taken from northern Iran, guitar and electronics, this is a late night album, an album which soothes, a set of sounds to think to. This is an album which lingers in the margins of consciousness, it conjures images gently, caresses them and ever so slowly lets them fade from view. With last year’s heralded Cracked Echoes on the excellent French label Soft Akbari established himself as an emerging talent within the ambient scene. With Vanishing Points he cements …

Three sonic heavyweights have come together to compose the dark drone beauty Possession. Released in time for Valentine’s Day, this EP has no easy endings, only endless destructive cycles played out in a ruined universe. Inspired from the minds of US-based musicians Jason Corder (offthesky), Cody Yantis and Carl Ritger (Radere), they have birthed a doom drone space centric scape of obsession, madness and despair. From the gripping unfolding of the opening track Ascension, to the mind travel of A Viscous Tear and the majestic denouement of the 20 minute closing piece Wrath to Wraith, Possession will hold you in …

Born out of a collaboration stretching from Vancouver to Athens, A Changing Light centres on change, dislocation and uncertainty. From different time zones, and very different cities Valiska (Krzysztof Sujata) and Zenjungle (Phil Gardelis) have carved out an album which celebrates change, nuance and noise. ”We hope that the listener will be as uncertain about where they will find themselves from track to track as the image that we had in our minds,” the pair explain. From the gorgeously gritty Derive to Gardelis’ blissful sax work on Nightwinds this is a special collaboration. Gatefold case, printed disc, hand-numbered and cut, …

Overwintering was inspired by watching animals leave Boston. As the weather turned cold it also became a lot quieter. As Devin Underwood, who releases as Specta Ciera explains: “Birds leaving the area for warmer climates created a sense of abandonment and isolation, the lack of song birds, buzzing and chirping of insects changed the atmosphere of my surroundings entirely. With “Overwintering” I wanted to try and harness those feelings of the deepest, coldest moments of winter as the first snows settle in and slowly with it, the deep freeze develops.” Handmade, cut, numbered CD-r Overwintering by Specta Ciera

Inspired by vast empty spaces from military training sites to churches, Two Suns Were Visible in the Sky presents a vast panorama filled with joyous signs of life. From the opening sweep of ‘International Debris’ to the melancholic tones of the all too brief ‘Some Early Hour’ and the wistful ‘Farewell, Swifts’ this is album full of emotion. Baker said he was inspired by the emptiness of abandoned spaces because he felt they were so desolate you could almost see the sun rise again before it had set. With ‘Two Suns’ Baker might just have succeeded in bringing some extra …

Latest Tapes

Jagged bursts of strobe lights. Cackling radio signals bristling with interference. Sawtooth patterns of tactile noise. Torn flesh. Scabbed wounds. These are some of the building blocks to Jim Haynes’ Scarlet. This crucible of unkempt rhythm and noise-pulse turbulence was decomposed and sutured together from the various sources of electromagnetic and psychic detritus into an unstable mutation of sequential error. The eight tracks of Scarlet stand as vastly radical and obsessive variations on the theme of repetition through trauma. Each of the tracks may have begun with the same system of building blocks, but quickly spiral into disparate orbits, time-lag …

Inspired by the stream that flows through my parents’ town in upstate New York, this piece was written as a descriptive reflection of movement and stillness. I have walked along the banks of this frozen brook in Winter, witnessed its healthy rushing energy in Autumn and savored its pacifying calm in green Spring. Its name suggests imagery of both heat and coolness, and I wanted this to be represented in the mixing. The solemn stillness of the single icey tone and jagged high frequency shards of feedback balance out through Greg’s impressive mastering which seems to have run through the …

Latest Books

The shortest tale can leave the longest impression. Devourings collects a variety of stories – each its own piece but bound to the next by a broader, unifying theme: being enveloped, devoured, by a moment, an encounter, a political situation, an emotion – which connect with absolute potency. Be they over a handful of paragraphs or a spread of pages, these short – and shorter – stories linger with a palpable resonance. Devourings travels to many destinations, encompassing several scenarios and introducing myriad protagonists – and, frequently, antagonists. ‘Esthers’ follows a snaking murder plot set in 1940s Argentina; the malevolent …

“There was a tradition in this parish that on All-Hallows’ Eve a Spirit announced from the altar the names of those who were doomed to die in the coming year. The Spirit was locally called Angelystor.” – Elias Owen, 1887 Estimated at 4,000 to 5,000 years old, the ancient yew in the churchyard of St. Digain, Llangernyw may be oldest living thing in the British Isles. It is strangely apt that such a long lived tree – immortal by comparison to our own lifespans – should grow next to a church reputed to be haunted by an ‘angel of death’, …

Also spelled as ‘Enuma Elish’, Enûma Eliš is the Babylonian creation mythos named after its opening words (incipit) which means ‘when on high’. It’s about thousand lines recorded in Old Babylonian on seven clay tablets. Here on this chapbook, the term ‘when on high’ is re-worked as poems about life, creation, death and eternity. Following a vague sequence, it starts covering meditations on flowers, stars, life and the idea of most absolute beginning and ending, but till the end poem itself finds remedies in the everlasting harmony of incarnation and fragments which has no beginning or ending. Even in smallest …

It all starts from a famous maxim of uncertain authorship – Writing about music is like dancing about architecture – and from a trope that is also a neurological phenomenon – synesthesia, the description or perception of one kind of sensation in terms of another. Smelling words, seeing sounds, hearing colours. Aidan Baker deliberately and skillfully plays with such figures, applying them not only to sensations but also to artistic techniques. The poems in this collection are about artworks that use other media than words – paintings, films and songs by a selection of such artists as Man Ray, Wim …

Below Sea Level is the first 12k release from seasoned musician and electronic sound artist Simon Scott. The inspiration behind Below Sea Level, including its music, title, artwork and photography (see accompanying journal) originally derives from Scott’s desire to musically explore the desolate and controversial environment of the Fens in East Anglia, UK. The memories Scott has of visiting this area as a child make this a poignant and highly personal project that explores nostalgic familiarity with a desire to capture the musicality of the landscape. For two years Scott ventured into this former wetland with hydrophones and self-built recording devices to explore the land that is cartographically below mean sea level, trace the devastating history of this environment caused by the drainage of the land, and arrange it into conceptual musical and visual project.

Scott has, in the main, eschewed the guitar backbone of his previous releases, preferring instead to capture the timbres and textures of the landscape to form the basis for the seven tracks. His signature reverberated guitar does still surface, the beginning of the album begins with sparse finger picking reminiscent of Laughing Stock-era Talk Talk, but it only adds brief flickers of colour to the central field recordings throughout the album.

Below Sea Level explores the aesthetics of active listening and, via a self-built MaxMSP patch, digitally disects the natural and man-made recordings Scott discovered within the Fens. The juxtaposing of analogue and digital timbres and textures, the man-made and natural world sounds, create epic interwoven soundscapes that blend the recognizable (eg.: birdsong) with undistinguishable sounds, sometimes confusing what is natural and synthetic. Scott presents an abstraction of a place that is arranged and manipulated for aural contemplation outside of the Fens (in alien environments) where the music collaborates with each unique listening environment. For the final stage of Scott’s process he played the mixed songs out of portable speakers and re-recorded them in the wide open spaces and natural ambiences of the Fens to capture the collaborative nature of Below Sea Level. Having these field-recorded sounds; the crows, the passing trains and tractors, recorded in real time with the mixes rather than multi-tracked in the studio provides a strong sense of place and immediacy. The enviornment breathes around the songs in a very natural and uncertain way.

We welcome back Australian label
Flaming Pines
with their seven most recent releases HERE
more to follow...

Formats/Labels

DVD of The Week

Released 7th August 2015 WWII: Ninety-six musicians flee Germany to settle in Australia, many forced to leave their homeland for playing blacklisted jazz. After internment in the desert as enemy aliens, many are forced to abandon their art when immigration officials insist on practical labour skills as a condition of entry. Most downplay their talent to enter safe haven, then disappear into obscurity. Few ever work publicly as musicians again. “Internecine: The Vanished Musicians” showcases an innovative collaboration between local visual artists and international sound designers: in superimposing an audio/visual narrative onto Swing-era history, the contributors celebrate the silent contribution …

The artistic residence of ‘LOUD LISTENING – THROUGH THE SOUND OF MURANO GLASS’ was held between 28th and 31st January, 2014. The entire residence was documented through a docu-film. The DVD contains the documentary film as well as the sounds recorded in the furnaces and the places of glass production in some of the most important furnaces of Murano.

CD of The Week

The second release from Time Sensitive Materials is this first solo album from moody Swedish chanteuse Sara Forslund entitled “Water Became Wild”. Sara sang vocals on and was half of the duo behind the Birch And Meadow release on Time Released Sound a couple of years back. As another first for us, this new release is in tandem with the great Dutch indie label, Volkoren. They are doing the standard digipak, and digital versions, and we made the deluxe limited version of this release. The album was mixed by famous, old school analog engineer John Wood, known for his work …

Releases 19 June 2015 Anne Garner’s fourth album is a beguiling blend of alternative pop, spectral lullabies and tender neo-classical arrangements. This dreamy, eerie and unashamedly beautiful collection of vocal-electronic crossover works represents the patient distillation of raw life experience into something subtle, ethereal and sublime. The album follows Remaking the Pearl, Magic & Madness and the acclaimed Trusting a Twirled World. “They’re not just pretty songs – they have a real emotional weight and depth. They comfort, they console and they protect. She treats the music like a son or a daughter, as if it were the most precious …

Vinyl of The Week

Three gentle guitar improvisations… meditations, enriched with Ambient loopsets and delicate sound layers from tape. Takahiro Yorifuji sets up the right mood to calm down. It’s all that easy, the main thing is, the casette player’s working fine, the fingers will find the right notes all by themselves. Enjoy laid back listening. Comes with the 12″ EP, a gatefold cover print, a button and sticker with Hakobune logo – the CD is included as well. All packed in a nice and useful tote bag. Limited edition of 100 Vitex Negundo by hakobune

Tape of The Week

“Sleet” is a pastoral fable with a resolutely vulnerable core – a ’60s folk narrative echoing through modern classical and ambient music. Enrico Coniglio evokes the cadenced ghosts of My Home, Sinking with the aid of Natalia Drepina, Katie English, Peter Gallo, Piero Bittolo Bon and Giovanni Natoli. The fading Morriconian memories of “Sleet” evolve through a languid structured homage to Italian songwriters, embellished by weaving flute, cello, vibraphone, duduk and drums, like a prayer for human tragedy to a deaf and distant cosmos. The story of a young virgin woman and a miraculous gift is reinterpreted amongst the cobwebs …

Featured Label: Flaming Pines

Memory is that most elusive thing, so certain at a distance, but once examined up close full of holes and doubt. Memories fade, change, are re-written, morph and elide. At once ungraspable, unknowable and always out of reach they are also an essential part of each of us, and the basis of life as we know it. In Musicophilia: Tales of music and the brain, neurologist and author Oliver Sacks writes: “Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.” This album with its …

Amfibion takes the listener into a rich, bizarre and disorienting world, a biological melting pot of the uncanny, the bewildering and the awe inspiring. Comprised of treated field recordings of frogs taken during excursions in the Brazilian Amazon from 2007 to 2011, Amfibion is largely based on mating songs, and Artificial Memory Trace treats them in a manner which underlines the humid fecundity of this ecological wonderland. These pieces froth and foam, drip and slide from crashing crescendo to an eerie throb in the blink of an eye. There are croaks, shimmers, pulses and drones, sounds come together suddenly, and …

Iran’s Arash Akbari’s Vanishing Point nestles into inbetween places, revelling in the indistinct, the delicate and the mysterious. Bringing together field recordings taken from northern Iran, guitar and electronics, this is a late night album, an album which soothes, a set of sounds to think to. This is an album which lingers in the margins of consciousness, it conjures images gently, caresses them and ever so slowly lets them fade from view. With last year’s heralded Cracked Echoes on the excellent French label Soft Akbari established himself as an emerging talent within the ambient scene. With Vanishing Points he cements …

Three sonic heavyweights have come together to compose the dark drone beauty Possession. Released in time for Valentine’s Day, this EP has no easy endings, only endless destructive cycles played out in a ruined universe. Inspired from the minds of US-based musicians Jason Corder (offthesky), Cody Yantis and Carl Ritger (Radere), they have birthed a doom drone space centric scape of obsession, madness and despair. From the gripping unfolding of the opening track Ascension, to the mind travel of A Viscous Tear and the majestic denouement of the 20 minute closing piece Wrath to Wraith, Possession will hold you in …

Born out of a collaboration stretching from Vancouver to Athens, A Changing Light centres on change, dislocation and uncertainty. From different time zones, and very different cities Valiska (Krzysztof Sujata) and Zenjungle (Phil Gardelis) have carved out an album which celebrates change, nuance and noise. ”We hope that the listener will be as uncertain about where they will find themselves from track to track as the image that we had in our minds,” the pair explain. From the gorgeously gritty Derive to Gardelis’ blissful sax work on Nightwinds this is a special collaboration. Gatefold case, printed disc, hand-numbered and cut, …

Overwintering was inspired by watching animals leave Boston. As the weather turned cold it also became a lot quieter. As Devin Underwood, who releases as Specta Ciera explains: “Birds leaving the area for warmer climates created a sense of abandonment and isolation, the lack of song birds, buzzing and chirping of insects changed the atmosphere of my surroundings entirely. With “Overwintering” I wanted to try and harness those feelings of the deepest, coldest moments of winter as the first snows settle in and slowly with it, the deep freeze develops.” Handmade, cut, numbered CD-r Overwintering by Specta Ciera

Inspired by vast empty spaces from military training sites to churches, Two Suns Were Visible in the Sky presents a vast panorama filled with joyous signs of life. From the opening sweep of ‘International Debris’ to the melancholic tones of the all too brief ‘Some Early Hour’ and the wistful ‘Farewell, Swifts’ this is album full of emotion. Baker said he was inspired by the emptiness of abandoned spaces because he felt they were so desolate you could almost see the sun rise again before it had set. With ‘Two Suns’ Baker might just have succeeded in bringing some extra …